Why are there no alternative ICUs?

Medical Team Working On Patient In Emergency Room

I’ve got a great idea for a new medical drama: Homeopathy 911!

It takes place in a quackademic medical center and follows the lives and loves of alternative medical practitioners.

Can’t you just imagine the scenes in the ER?

“Nurse, get me the reiki practitioner STAT!!”

Or how about the crises in the ICU where young practitioners struggle to mix homeopathic preparations in massive amounts of water to create super-dilute medications for super sick people? It’s the perfect backdrop for illicit sex.

And what about tension in the operating room as chiropractors struggle to manipulate the beautiful innocent bystander hemorrhaging to death after being struck by gang warfare bullets? Is it any wonder that the married nurse falls for the hunky chiropractor once she sees what he can do with his hands?

And then it occurred to me:

There are no alternative Emergency Rooms.

There are no Quacktensive Care Units (QCUs).

And the only surgery performed by purveyors of pseudoscience is the wallet biopsy. If it comes up green, they proceed with treatment.

There are none of these things because alternative practitioners don’t take care of sick people; they don’t even know how to take care of sick people. They only care for the worried well, carefully separating them from their money by shilling herbs, supplements, books and DVDs that no one needs because they are utterly, spectacularly ineffective!

Alternative medicine isn’t medicine; it’s trickery. It’s the placebo effect writ large.

Even practitioners of alternative medicine recognize that it doesn’t actually work. That’s why there are no alternative hospitals, no alternative free clinics, and no medical missions to treat Ebola with homeopathy, or reiki or chiropractic. Its own practitioners recognize that alternative medicine only “works” in first world societies where well off people have discretionary income, not in underdeveloped countries where poor people can’t pay. And it only “works” to enrich alternative providers, not to diagnose, prevent or treat actual diseases.

So I guess Homeopathy 911! is a non-starter.

Hold on! I have another idea.

How about a reality show about women, influenced by midwives, doulas and childbirth educators to view birth as a piece of performance art, choosing to giving birth unattended in the wild.

Wait, what? Lifetime has already thought of that and Born In The Wild, will debut soon?

Hmmm. Maybe Homeopathy 911! isn’t such a bad idea after all.